Halloween "Creeps and Creatures" designing and creating the prosthetics.

Am alive!!

I have to apologise for my absent with this blog, there has been a ridiculous amount of work going on which caused me to stop updating this blog BUT fear not I have returned with many creations and application that I want to share with the world!

So in this blog I will be detailing my Creeps and Creatures creation that were sculpted, casted and creating for the purposes of Blackburn Youth Zone's Halloween event. This has been the best job to date, I absolutely loved creating all these fantastic characters and I would not complain if this was my full time job; just creating monsters and creatures! Dream job.

Like with any creation, it all begins with a brief and whole load of doodles and design plans. The characters that I was given to create for where these rather marvellous nightmare delights....

We have "Exorcise character", Morgue victim, Grave Yard/Guide, Clown and "Chaser." Now there was a few changes on the day to these characters and a few adaptions needed due to the models changing which is a valuable lesson to anyone thinking of becoming a makeup artist or tackling this sort of project. ALWAYS HAVE BACK UPS!

Now my "Exorcise" characters was designed with the intent to use all manual effects to create the character. Ridge Collodion was my go to, this is an amazing product for creating fantastic realistic scars and indentations in the skin. I also aimed to use contouring and highlighting to give the illusion of sunken in features and an overall haggard look to the model.

The "Graveyard digger/Guide" was the character that was intended to guide the public around the areas of the "Haunted House", showing them the puzzles and making sure they took the right turn. This was one of the characters that changed on the day to "Mad Scientists", which was easy to adapt. I did create prosthetics pieces to change the features of the model.

 

What creepy demonic character isn't complete without a demonic brow ala Buffy The Vampire Slayer, this was part of my extra's kit for just incase I have an extra characters or the existing prosthetics don't fit the model. Everyone loves a demonic brow!

 

 

Quickest easiest way to change someone's face is to alter the shape/size of their nose and chin, which is the design plan I came up with for the Grave Diggers. I had the idea of character with sharp features (and teeth) similar to that of the Penguin from Batman. That creepy look with extra cuts/scars all over the face and again using highlighting and shading to contour the features to more sunken effect.

 

The next character I was brief on was for a character that chased the people around the event. I was told to do whatever I wanted but it has to be scary. So I came up with the cage face, as in the design plan behind the cage needs to appear black and the eyes need to be very dark.

As you will see soon this character once applied and the actors were in their costumes, scared the crap out of me!

 

 

Morgue Character was a cool one to create, they wanted my rib cast that I created for a different character. They wanted the model/actor to be led down on a morgue table with a cloth over them and to jump up when ever anyone was in the room. So they wanted a gruesome looking person rather then a monster. 

 

 

 The ribs took a while to create, as they made from latex rather then casted in gelatine like the other pieces. I needed the piece to be lighter then gelatine which meant using cotton and latex to build up in the mould rather then filling up the mould with latex.

This took about 3-4 days to fully complete and drying fully.

 

 

Love sculpting skulls, so I just had to have a clean half skull face for this morgue character. Teeth are enamel. 

The next characters was a bit of a homage to American Horror Story: Freak show, Twisty the clown. Love that character and it always instils fear into most people. So the mouth was inspired by that character with a few changes to the shapes.
The reason of the features are all manual applications with thick blood and manual cuts.

 

This character was my mad scientist one, well one the mad scientists. I had several actors who needs to talk so the makeup was kept manual on these characters and the big mouths were used on the ones that chased.

 

Here it is all painted up.

 

I had an absolute blast designing and sculpting these characters, in the next blog I will show you the end result and what happen on the night.

 

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I'll be trying super hard to keep up to date with this blog.

 

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